Passing It On

How does home cooking fit in your family history?

For most of us, there’s nothing like home cooking. For many of us, though, home cooking is pretty much just a memory.

Instead it’s more like fast food lunches, dinner-time meals cobbled together from the frozen food aisle, breakfast burritos from a drive-through or alien-tasting toaster popups snagged while heading out the door in the morning.

Those of us who value real food cooked by real people in real time are, whether we know it or not, soldiers in what has become known as the “slow food movement.” We are the conduits by which favorite recipes of our past can be passed along to our children. Some of us do this merely by our actions, preparing tasty, healthy meals for our offspring on a regular basis. Some go a step further and make sure the recipes are shared, sometimes in the form of a family cookbook.

Passing on recipes can be an exasperating experience. Many recipes may call for a pinch of this, a dash of that, a jelly jar of water or similarly vague measurements. Back in the day, many recipes were passed on orally, often in a hands-on manner. We demand more precision today. One solution to this would be to video record the person as they actually prepare the dish. At the very least, you should taste test your recipes before passing them on to others. Many common ingredients of the past have been revamped or are no longer available.

What constitutes a family recipe is a matter of debate. If a family favorite originated elsewhere, give proper credit. A brouhaha surrounding recipes on John McCain’s web site in which his wife, Cindy, passed on Food Network recipes as “McCain Family Recipes” led to their being pulled. Don’t create your own family “spaghetti-gate.”

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of dad1_.

The building's gone but the memories remain

Quite a few buildings of my youth are gone. Some of them are long-gone.

Franklin School, my elementary school in Council Bluffs, Iowa, is among them. In its place, a newer building carrying the same name has risen across the street from the school I remember, with its stunted gym, creaky floors and second-floor fire escape where Mr. Coziahr, the building custodian, swept the leftovers of a day of hard learning and recesses fluttering to a gravelly grave.

Gone, too, is Twin City Bowl, where I whiled away many an hour of my teen years, some of them working, many more preparing for my never-realized goal of professional pin stardom. I did, however, learn the ins and outs of handicapping horse races, every intimate detail in the life cycle of a bottle of beer, how to grill a mean cheeseburger, the embarrassing and hostile consequences of installing belts backwards on Brunswick automatic pinsetters, the potency of industrial chemicals and the wisdom of accepting only cash in payment for services rendered at a failing business enterprise.

Sad as these losses are to me, the people of Iowa suffered a greater loss this week when Breitbach’s Country Dining was leveled by fire on Monday morning. Located in the small hamlet of Balltown, Iowa, Breitbach’s was touted as Iowa’s oldest restaurant, dating back to the stagecoach days of 1852.

I’ve eaten at Breitbach’s three or four times over the years and each visit was a treat. While I found the lunch buffet food to be pretty ordinary, it was known for its homemade soups and Mile High Lemon Pie. The dining area was crammed with antiques and collectibles and each trip through the buffet line reminded me of a pot luck. I loved that.

True to its name, Balltown has a ballfield located east of the restaurant, high on a bluff that overlooks the picturesque Mississippi River valley north of Dubuque. It’s among the most scenic drives in the state.

Remembering what has been lost in our lifetimes is often an overlooked part of our histories. Without our witness, we could be depriving our heirs of vital information available nowhere else.

Larry Lehmer is founder and president of When Words Matter, a company that specializes in collecting stories and writing family stories. Check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo of Breitbach's Country Dining in 2000 courtesy of ISU_79.

Food in America today is a far cry from yesterday

Two distantly related news items this week have me thinking about food and how much it has changed in my lifetime.

The first item was about the Iowa Hunger Summit which was part of World Food Prize week. The World Food Prize honors innovations in increasing the world’s food supply. Lunch for some diners at the Iowa Hunger Summit consisted of a soupy corn concoction and a mound of vegetable-flecked rice, a feast for many of Earth’s residents but what amounts to a starvation diet for most amply fed Americans.

The second item was the news that McDonald’s posted the biggest dividend boost in its history in the third quarter of 2007, thanks to surging sales in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The Gospel of the Big Mac is apparently being gobbled up elsewhere as well with McDonald’s stock reaching an all-time high last month.

The business-side success of the fast food industry has been accompanied by a similar growth in the rate of obesity, particularly childhood obesity, a connection that’s been widely reported. What has been less widely reported, I believe, is the change in family dynamics that has accompanied these trends.

For blue collar families like mine, it was a relatively rare treat for our family to dine out in the pre-fast food years. The first McDonald’s in my home town appeared in my high school years, right next to my high school, in fact. It caught on real fast. Over the years, they’ve added dining areas, drive-throughs and expanded their constantly changing menus.

Other things have happened over the years to change our eating habits. For instance, the Des Moines area now has several Thai, Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and Indian restaurants. We have restaurants featuring food from El Salvador, Great Britain, Germany, Afghanistan and Greece as well.  We had next to none of that when I was a kid.

Food available in grocery stores these days is a far cry from that available just a few, short decades ago. Eggplant was about as weird as it got back then. Mangos? Avocados? Cilantro? Are you kidding?

The biggest change, though, may be the fact that families get together for a casual meal together far less often than in the past. Dinner was a time for catching up, sharing your day, telling stories, making plans. It’s almost quaint to think of such a thing in these helter-skelter days, as foreign as an eggplant to a city kid in the 1950s.

How has mealtime changed for you in your lifetime? Is that for better or for worse?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flick photo courtesy of  littleowl.

Taking a swig from our thirsty past

When I was a kid, my family kept a water bottle in our refrigerator.

My brothers and I were frequent visitors to the fridge on hot summer days. House rules dictated that you poured the cool water into a glass for drinking and when the bottle was less than half full, you refilled it to the top and returned it to the refrigerator. Like most rules, these were broken. We drank directly from the bottle and sometimes were in too big a hurry to refill the bottle.

But I can still remember how good that cool water tasted after a hard day on the basepaths or after grinding out a few miles on my one-speed bicycle on a stifling, humid Iowa summer day.

This might seem like an odd topic to include in a family history, but the way we hydrate ourselves has changed radically in recent years and water issues will be huge for future generations. How we handle our thirst today may be much different than in the future.

Even water, the staple of thirst-quenching in my childhood home, is handled differently today. I’m still not quite used to someone offering me water in their home and then handing me a store-bought plastic  bottle of the stuff. Nor am I fond of the now-common practice of prohibiting the carrying of your own water into an event so that you are compelled to buy their bottled water at ridiculously high costs.

For many of us, water is not even our first choice. As a child, soda (which we called pop) was a treat, something you got primarily outside the home. We rarely had it in the house. Now cheap soda can be found everywhere.

When you factor in health, economic and environmental factors, ordinary tap water deserves a much better fate.

Thousands of bicyclists are travelling through Iowa this week on RAGBRAI, many of them on an annual pilgrimage to our fair state. It will be hot; they will get thirsty.

It was on one of those steamy days on RAGBRAI that I stopped for a break on a farmer’s lawn, lounging beneath a shady tree and soaking up whatever breeze I could snare. The farmer’s young daughter stood nearby with a hose, filling up water bottles and offering drinks.

One rider filled his bottle, took a sip and spat it out. The mineral content of the rural water was apparently too much.

“Don’t you have any good water?” the rider asked.

Without missing a beat, the young girl replied, “This is the good water. This is the way we like it.”

How did you quench your thirst as a child? What about your grandparents? Our descendants will find it interesting to learn how you dealt with such matters.

Larry Lehmer is a personal biographer who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or e-mail him.

Flickr photo courtesy of  dmacioce.

A dash of this, a pinch of that: Cooking up some family history

I've written some of my Danish and German heritage. I've written less about the Irish and Czech heritage that I married into.

One of the many great joys of this merging of cultures is food-related. My wife is one of a lengthy line of great cooks of Bohemian food. The recipe card pictured with this post comes from her collection. It's a recipe for dumplings that she got from her aunt Caroline. It's allegedly the same recipe used at Omaha's fabled Bohemian Cafe. While I can't vouch for the authenticity of the recipe's lineage, you can probably tell from the stains on the card that it's a family favorite.

We reveal a good deal of our heritage through food. Indeed, many family cookbooks are laced with details of a family's history. In some cases, it's all a family has to connect it to its past. I suppose that's why I'm such a big fan of potluck dinners. I've always found it fascinating to see what others eat. While many non-Iowans see our state as a white bread, meat-and-potatoes place, that's definitely not the case. You're just as likely to find pud thai, empenadas or biryani at a Des Moines potluck as lime Jell-o or deviled eggs. There's a story behind every dish.

Here's the story behind 94-year-old David Eyre's pancakes, a recipe that's being passed down through the family and recently found its way to the pages of the New York Times magazine.

Think of the effect food has had on your life. How special it was to get an orange at Christmas. Those Fourth of July picnics. Wedding receptions. Family reunions. What are the stories behind your favorite recipes?